Archive for March, 2009

1 day+1nightout gives Vaaz & me a lot of gyan about ethics concerning genetic engineering. It’s pretty interesting actually, but I never expected an Inst. elective seminar to take so much time. Ooooff.

Some of my friends have been giving repeated telephonic interviews without any job offer in sight. Today, one of them told me that he had 4 telephonic interviews before being told that his resume doesn’t match the job description. Many interviews seem to have no purpose. This can be frustrating if you think that performance in an interview reflects your real competence, so instead of demeaning yourself consider my alternate hypothesis:

Telephonic interviews are not meant to test how good you’re for the job–you’re brilliant, they instead, form a platform the company gives its employees to improve their interviewing skills.

Generally, when you listen to any prof speak about IIT in the 80s, you get a
feeling that the place was more sacrosanct with all students leading peaceful, academically obedient lives. The other day, Yogesh and I were speaking to Rathikumar, one of the mess workers from H5. Rathikumar has been working in H5 for more than 30 years now and has probably seen more students in his lifetime than any prof! He shared a few incidents from the past which gave us a glimpse of darker side of hostel life back then. Some excerpts:
”Unlike now, ragging was a major problem at that time–freshers used to get beaten up mercilessly and were left stranded without money in places like Bhandup, Mulund,… There were a lot of foreign students from places like Palestine, Sri Lanka, etc who, in their 2nd-3rd year, used to rag the locals more severely than the localite-seniors themselves. This issue had created a lot of tension among students. In 1982 or ’84–I don’t recollect correctly, the situation became so bad that the institute issued a notice to all students to vacate their rooms in 24 hours. Students who dint take the warning seriously were literally thrown out, some of them who had gone out for a day or two weren’t allowed to enter the campus–the main gate was closed for everyone. We(the mess workers) helped many students during that time to transfer their belongings from rooms here.”

“In an other case, there was this fresher from from Bihar who wasn’t allowed to eat from mess the whole day. When he couldn’t tolerate the torture any more at night he beat up 3 seniors so badly that they had to be admitted to hospital. It was a horrible sight to see everyone bleeding profusely.”

“Then there were a lot of rich brats who used to regularly supply alcohol to hostel inmates. I remember Rajiv Tandon(Raveena Tandon’s brother) regularly hand out 2 bottles everyday to mess workers”

“Being asked to strip was probably the least of the tortures the juniors had to face, once the situation was so out of control that the police had to intervene to bring things in control in H11“.

We should consider ourselves lucky to be in the institute at this time when things are so much better. What say?

When I was in XI/XII I used to throughly enjoy solving physics problems. There is this problem in Irodov which goes like this:‘Suppose you take two stones and throw them in opposite directions horizontally, after what time do they become mutually perpendicular to one another?’.
I just felt like writing up the solution to this one. 🙂

Just a couple of days ago, I had been to Hasya Kavi Sameylan in LT. I’ve seen many mimicry shows before but this was the first time I saw someone who could mimic 52 different actors in less than 5 mins without a break!

We played Holi today with a lot more enthu than last year, probably because everyone being in one hostel made coordination and forming of a gang easy. We serially pulled out everyone hiding in their rooms, got drenched in colors, tore each others’ clothes[!] and played in the mud pool. All this followed by a long bath, ‘gala’ lunch & nap. Perfect Day.

This is a cool little web application I came across with lets you search images using images. Their database is far from exahaustive, but it’s still pretty useful. It’s very handy when I’m looking for a higher-resolution version of an image I already have.

Most people don’t have time to go through manifestos and make a comparative study of candidates before giving their vote. Same with me..I simply voted for those candidates who I remembered talking to and looked like they cared about their post.
If you’re contesting for elections, be upbeat and show up–it goes a long way.